How I Learned to Love a Swiss Sausage

When I first moved to Switzerland, I was not a sausage eater. I didn't eat hot dogs, I didn't eat corn dogs. I didn't need to be a consumer of all things pig. In America, there was something called variety. So I could survive on things like hamburgers at picnics or popcorn at the ballpark.

But in Switzerland, it's sausage or starvation. There's no hamburger option. There's cervelat or wurst.

To avoid starvation, I started slow. I'd take one bite of my husband's cervelat at a festival and ponder if I could really learn to eat more than that. Eventually I'd take two bites, then three, and then one day last year at Christmas time, I actually took part in the community sausage roast...by grilling a marshmallow.

While little Swiss children pointed and stared, I proudly grilled my marshmallow, but it looked weak and sad among the meaty sausage sticks surrounding it. So I stuffed my American Jet-Puffed marshmallows into my backpack after roasting just one and stared at all the little kids holding three-foot long burning sausage skewers, thinking, if this was America, this little Christmas sausage gathering would turn into a lawsuit.

So imagine my own surprise, when I suggested to my husband that we go have a Broetla (Swiss German for sausage roast) on a hilltop on Sunday. (Swiss German readers, please correct my spelling). We cooked our cervelat over a fire and even ate them Swiss style, holding the sausages like a banana, and dipping them in mustard. The only unSwiss thing about our little Sunday picnic were the paper plates we ate them off of. We just couldn't get motivated to drag our china up the mountain.

But I figure that doesn't matter. Because I ate the whole thing.